Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Dreams are necessary to life.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.